Harry MacPherson — Squared Circles and Other Poems

Harry MacPherson wrote poetry with a newspaperman’s timing and a cartoonist’s eye for the ridiculous. Squared Circles moves from sentimental song and civic lyric to comic monologue, automobile satire, topical verse, and poems whose marginal comments become part of the joke. MacPherson knew the mobile culture he described: athlete, student editor, illustrated reporter, advertising man, and newspaper writer, he followed the new century through school publications, western cities, military camps, and the increasingly motorized streets of Southern California. His best poems let that movement disturb the page through refrain, dialogue, interruption, and sudden changes of voice. Squared Circles and Other Poems restores the complete book together with recovered verse from newspapers and magazines, revealing an agile popular poet whose humor depends on the exact relation among typography, speech, and the public life of his moment.